Piedmont

This thing was born as joke, kind of how-to for Americans to understand Piedmontese people. Yet it was met with much more interest and attention than a joke usually deserves, and I myself started to take interest in further analyzing the sociological aspects connected to my native language. So I eventually decided to make a sort of online book of it.

The structure of the family as mapped by a language is also an extremely interesting source of information about social behaviour in a culture. Since many people seem to have like my previous quick how-to, here you get a follow up.

An heavily context depended set of mind obviously produced different naming conventions, depending on the position of the viewer. So we start from the social titles. This is the way in which we address people belonging to external families. It's basically our system of public social titles.

A word about granularity

When you are raised in a culture, no matter which one, you end up being shaped by it. It's not a matter of blood, and no stupid racist theory can apply. It's more a matter of imprinting, as Lorenz would put it. The imprinting you get shapes your vision of the world, your relational map and the way you relate to people. Since you develop your maps for you to interpret reality and to send out signals from within a culture, you naturally "become" a member of that culture. Easy and fascinating, isn't it?

So we are back. It's been a long trip through unexpectedly different climates, a lot of people met and our first experience of pregnant travel, so also the first trip for our small Maria Catlin-a, although during the trip we did not know whether she was going to be born as a male or a female, she's only 4 months old now, and she'll see her first ray of light in February.